Cultured chimpanzees

J
ane Goodall has described her indignation and dismay when, back in the 1960s,
she submitted her first article about the behaviour of the chimpanzees of
the Gombe Park in Western Tanzania to an academic journal and was told that
she should not use the words “he” and “she”, but “it”. Things have moved on
a long way since then, and primatologists reporting detailed long-term
observations made in the field are no longer convicted without trial of the
capital offence of “anthropomorphism”. There is much irony in this, since
Darwin himself had no hesitation in attributing to members of other species
emotions, intentions, memories and intellectual capacities shared with human
beings. But for a surprisingly long time, these insights were simply
ignored. It might no longer be disputed that we are all descended from apes.
But perish the thought that chimpanzees or any other animals should be
claimed to be in any serious sense like us.

Goodall had already been at Gombe for fifteen years when Christophe Boesch and
his wife went to study the chimpanzees of the Taï forest in Ivory Coast. By
then, they were one among several teams of similar researchers in other
parts of Africa whose findings, covering nine separate chimpanzee
populations, have over the past few decades transformed our understanding of
the psychology and social behaviour patterns of our closest genetic
relatives. As soon as they went from the Taï forest to visit the Gombe
chimpanzees, Christophe and Hedwige Boesch were made unmistakably aware of
the cultural differences between one chimpanzee population and another. It
may seem obvious now that there is no more reason to expect all the
chimpanzees in Africa to be just like one another, either individually or
collectively, than all the human beings in Europe. But the idea that there
could be a securely established academic discipline of comparative cultural
primatology was in those days almost unthinkable. Whether the latter-day
counterparts of indignant Victorian clerics like it or not, chimpanzees are
like us in ways that both religious and secular opinion had ruled out a
priori for centuries. The complacent assumptions that only humans can
fashion tools, teach and learn from one another, convey messages to one
another, form sustainable alliances and cooperate in joint activity in
pursuit of a common purpose are by now as outdated as pre-Copernican
astronomy.

Chimpanzees are like us in ways that both religious and secular opinion had
ruled out a priori for centuries

The rearguard, however, has not surrendered or run away. On one flank are the
hardcore psychologists, as Boesch calls them, who give credence to no
explanation of any aspect of behaviour unless it comes from a controlled
experiment. On the other are the anthropologists, who regard “culture” as
their exclusive preserve and flatly refuse to admit to it creatures who lack
the capacity for conversation, art, ritual, myth and self-conscious
reflection about the world and their place within it.

No behavioural scientist questions the value of controlled experiments. But if
every significant discovery about the social behaviour of either animal or
human populations arrived at by other methods were to be consigned to the
flames, there wouldn’t be much left. There is, admittedly, a risk of
over-interpreting observations of the behaviour of other species in terms of
human character types. It may be mistaken, however tempting, to pick out
among the chimpanzees the cheating spouses, the ambitious politicians, the
wily pranksters, the importunate beggars, the inconsolable mourners, the
unselfish mothers, and the loyal friends whom we know so well from among
ourselves. But that is no reason to disbelieve first-hand reports
authenticated many times over of behaviour that cannot be accounted for by
genetically transmitted predisposition alone without allowance for
information affecting phenotype transmitted from mind to mind.

In any case, it is not as if controlled experiments were any less vulnerable
to misinterpretation than other methods of research. Boesch has some telling
criticisms to make of experiments made on chimpanzees removed from their
natural habitats. There are skills and capacities that are not going to be
elicited under the inhibiting constraints of a wholly alien environment. If
a chimpanzee fails to cooperate with a human subject or an unknown fellow
chimpanzee in a laboratory experiment, that is no proof of an inability to
cooperate with a known associate in the wild. As Boesch puts it, absence of
evidence isn’t evidence of absence. If chimpanzees are brought up under
artificial conditions away from what would have been their normal social
relationships, it is hardly surprising if their capacities and skills have
been impaired in consequence. Nor can they be properly tested in the lab for
spatial, any more than social, skills of the kind that they demonstrate in
the wild. Boesch makes in passing the uncomfortable point that some of the
experimental results that point to limitations in the social cognition of
captive chimpanzees mirror what has been found in socially deprived human
children brought up in Romanian orphanages.

He devotes less attention to the hardcore anthropological than to the hardcore
psychological opposition. But he is well aware of it. The anthropologists’
principal tactic is the well-tried one of moving the goalposts. If other
species are found to have some capacities hitherto thought to be unique to
humans, then other distinctively human capacities are invoked to draw the
line in a different place. But the critical line is the one between
behaviour determined by information affecting phenotype that has been passed
on genetically and information affecting phenotype that has been passed on
by imitation or learning – a line no less critical because imitation and
learning are themselves disputed concepts. Just as nobody questions the
importance of controlled experiments, so nobody questions the importance of
the distinctive human capacity for spoken language. But spoken language is
not the only way in which meaningful communication can be effected. Sounds
of many kinds are doing it all the time, as are gestures. Knuckle-knocking,
tree-drumming, and leaf-clipping chimpanzees are saying things that are both
understood and acted on. Pre-emptive definition of “culture” makes it more
difficult, not less, to reach a fuller understanding of the evolutionary
process that has led to our cumulative divergence from the last common
ancestor we share with the Gombe, Taï, and all other chimpanzees.

Knuckle-knocking, tree-drumming, and leaf-clipping chimpanzees are saying things
that are both understood and acted on

It is through the combination of experimental and field studies, including
studies of chimpanzees living in enlightened captive environments such as
that of the purpose-built Arnhem Zoo in the Netherlands, that the
traditional wisdom about human uniqueness has been, and is continuing to be,
revised. Small as the number of known chimpanzee cultures may be by
comparison with the number of human cultures in the ethnographic record, it
is enough for systematic comparison both within and between wild and captive
populations. Moreover, the range of individual variation is such that the
intellectual capacities of the clever may well be demonstrably more like
“ours” than those of the dim. Boesch doesn’t directly address the current
state of research on the performance of individual chimpanzees who have been
trained to understand the representative function of symbols or combine
lexigrams in accordance with grammatical rules used by their minders. But
even if the communication skills of even the most gifted chimpanzees fall a
long way short of human speech, that doesn’t justify sending them back again
from “him” and “her” to “it”.

Boesch doesn’t go as far as Frans de Waal in being willing to attribute
to chimpanzees the rudiments of a moral sense that could be argued to
underlie manifestations of what looks like righteous indignation at
perceived unfairness. This, and the related question of capacity for shame
or guilt which some observers have claimed to detect not only in apes but in
other species, is perhaps the topic of most interest to a wider readership.
But here, the hardcore opposition comes not only from psychologists or
anthropologists but from philosophers. For Richard Joyce, for example, who
in his The Evolution of Morality (2006) took issue directly with de Waal,
“moral judgements cannot be legitimately and seriously ascribed to a
non-language-user. Ergo, no moral judgements for chimps”. Well, maybe. Or
maybe that categorical pronouncement will have to be revised in the face of
well-validated empirical evidence which cannot be dismissed out of hand.
Meanwhile, the topic on which Boesch reports some of his most intriguing
observations is chimpanzees’ attitude to death. What conclusions are we to
draw when they are seen to guard the bodies of dead group members, give
immediate help to orphans, cover a dead body with leaves, and show signs of
“sorrow” when leaving the dead and signs of “respect” by keeping youngsters
at bay? “If”, says Boesch, “chimpanzees had an understanding of death, these
behaviors would make perfect sense to us. If not, they make you wonder, to
say the least”.

The reaction of the hardcore opposition will no doubt be one of scepticism
rather than wonder. But the remarkable findings of the by now numerous
researchers who have studied chimpanzees at length and in detail both in
captivity and in the wild can no longer be ignored by those psychologists,
anthropologists and sociologists who still think that they have nothing to
learn from primatologists that might affect their own convictions and
concerns. Nor can any reader fail to share the worries expressed by Boesch
about what is happening in the once remote areas where the different
chimpanzee populations could be studied in their still intact natural
environments. Not only has deforestation encroached on their habitats to the
point where some have disappeared altogether, but they have become exposed
to the depredations of poachers who think nothing of killing and eating
their children or kidnapping and selling them off as pets. There have for
many years been dedicated conservationists and campaigners working to
protect them, and they have not been entirely without support from both
official agencies and local people. But no one can be sure how many more
generations of Taï, Gombe, and the other African chimpanzees will go on
living in their primeval forests undisturbed by other than benevolent human
observers concerned only to understand and explain their psychology and
culture. For how long will they still be there to be studied in (to echo the
melancholy Jacques from As You Like It) “their assign’d and native
dwelling-place”?

W. G. Runciman is the editor of Max Weber: Selections in translation,
by Eric Matthews, first published in 1975.